Assessing the Accessibility of Web 2.0 Web Sites

Tyson McMillan and Lin Lin, University of North Texas

Tyson McMillan gave a dynamic presentation about his study of how accessible Web 2.0 sites are, using the Web Accessibility Barrier score created by Parmanto and Zeng (2005).  This gives a quantitative metric rather than a pass/fail grade, as many accessibility tests do.  The 176 sites in this work (88 Web 1.0 and 88 Web 2.0)  had to be evaluated manually (Excel) so in order to keep scope manageable, this work evaluated only the home page of each site in this sample.

Two major ways creators can increase the accessibility of Web 2.0 sites is to

-          put in alt tags for images

-          don’t use the same phrase in multiple links on the same page